by Fritz Galt
First he had overslept. Then Zurich’s blindingly clear sky had given him a throbbing headache. Next, he learned that his stepson, Brad West, was still free. And lastly, Liang’s main contact in the Chinese military had been murdered.
Buford limped around his shuttered office and contemplated his next move. He had world leaders descending on Beijing and needed to transport them all to southwest China. His contacts within China were limited. He would have to reach the President of the United States directly. So he placed the call.
Chuck Webster was still answering his personal cell phone. “Hello?”
“This is Beau. Write this down. I’ve got GPS coordinates for your destination.”
In the background, he heard the president ask for a pen and paper. “Thank you, President Qian.”
Buford held his head. He had interrupted a summit meeting between the two heads of state. He reeled off the GPS reading from his notes.
“I’ll have my Secret Service check it out right away.”
“No you won’t.”
“They won’t let me go on my own,” the president protested.
“Just don’t tell them in advance. That’s all I request. I suggest you ask Qian for a chopper or business jet to take you down there. It’s in southwestern China.”
“That won’t work. My boys only let me go on U.S. Government equipment with sufficient countermeasures.”
“Are they running the country? Make a command decision. It could be your last.”
“I suppose President Qian will oblige.”
“One more thing,” Buford said. “You may have noticed that you’re not the only head of state or business leader in Beijing at the moment.”
“Say ‘hi’ guys,” the president said, and put his cell on speakerphone.
Buford heard a chorus of greetings in several languages. Okay, so they were all there in one happy bunch. It was as cozy as a G8 summit. “Can I speak to you privately?” He waited for the speakerphone to turn off. “They’re all in on it, too. Only don’t tell President Qian. We don’t want to let him know what we’re up to.”
“So how should I put this?”
“Just suggest a sight-seeing tour for all of them. The Chinese are good hosts. Qian will supply the aircraft.”
“It’s evening here. I’ll arrange it for tomorrow morning.”
With that, President Webster hung up, without so much as a thank you.
Buford turned to his computer for solace. The vast sum of money he had accumulated appeared on the screen. To count all the numbers, he needed his sunglasses.
He allowed himself to get lost in all the zeros. It almost made his headache go away.
Chapter 49
Brad stood wobbling on the rowboat for a moment, then took a long stride onto the quay. Dripping wet and reeking of fish, he and May found themselves in the center of a busy fishing village.
She tried to wring the water out of her blouse. The white material wrinkled and clung to her skin.
They had no possessions, save her pouch with the two fake identity cards. Their only money was the few damp bills he had lifted off the woman on the bus. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, leaving a chill to the air. His stomach growled. And they had nowhere to sleep that night.
Yet he was alive and free.
“Do you want a potato?” May asked.
Sure. Why not have a potato?
She threaded a path through stalls that sold every conceivable organism related to the lake. Red, orange and golden mounds of fish flakes, crustaceans and spices lay heaped in wicker baskets. Opposite them, plastic buckets held flopping fish and unsuspecting crabs. One small woman showed him her basket full of shiny beans.
“What are these?” he asked. Maybe they could go vegetarian.
“Those are locusts,” May said.
He took a second look. Sure enough. They moved.
Another vendor showed them a vat of drowned dragonflies.
“Yum.”
“Here is a potato,” May said. A grandmotherly woman dressed in black looked up with a round, weathered face. Smoke puffed out of a tray of ashes before her. Her job was to shish kabob tiny boiled potatoes, peel them, and dip them in a mixture of spices.
May ordered a couple sticks, and the woman got to work right away. She laid the potato sticks onto a grating over the ashes and fanned the flames with a small cranking device. Ashes stirred and glowed and some adhered to the potatoes. She cranked away energetically until the potatoes were good and hot.
They paid one yuan for four sticks and the woman was happy to get it. Brad sucked on the first potato. It was warm and salty. Just the thing for an empty stomach.
“Want a fish?” May pointed to a table full of silver-scaled fish. Sticks were poked between their eyes or through their mouths.
“I’ll pass.”
He steered her away from the market and up a steep alley. Shop fronts were open wide. There was a lively trade in tie-dyed indigo and rusty hinges. Sewage seeped down the dirt street. Where could they stay for the night and avoid the smell?
He stepped into a courtyard. Inside was a white and red tile building. Hotel? No, he heard students reciting their lessons.
He looked through an open window. Kids were seated in pairs behind wooden tables. The only light was twilight filtering through the windows.
“Look.” May tugged him away. “Here is a temple.”
How would she act in a temple? Most cultural and religious relics had been scrubbed out of life in China to pave the way for the future that the Party envisioned. May was just one generation away from god- and ancestor-worshiping peasants. Her attitude toward the temple seemed to waver between scorn and curiosity. She had been taught by her atheistic teachers to look down on religion, and she had learned that lesson well. Yet, temples were an oddity to most Chinese. The few that remained in the country were either neglected by authorities or hidden in grain cellars.
Inside the walled courtyard, he found an altar guarded by two colorful dragon sculptures. Under the red-tiled roof was a painting of the temple’s patron god. To one side, prayer cushions lay before the statue of a scholar. Incense sticks burned all around him. Clearly, people came to pray for better grades.
May’s tiny voice broke the stillness. “He looks like my dad.”
Sure enough, the old man with the balding head and long white beard bore a remarkable resemblance to Dr. Yu. In one hand, the stone figure held a paintbrush to signify the written word, and in the other he held a microscope.
Brad edged closer. Damn if that wasn’t her father!
She was reading the characters on the wall behind him. “Dr. Yu Zhaoguo.”
Brad was puzzled. How did people in remote Yunnan know her father? His work in paleoanthropology had popularized a new line of thinking that Homo erectus in China evolved and merged with Homo sapiens to form modern man. It was a revolutionary concept that scientists around the world had come to generally accept. Perhaps Dr. Yu was someone to idolize.
“But why worship him?” Brad asked. “He’s not even dead.”
May held up an incense stick and studied the steady stream of smoke that it emitted. It trailed to the north, parallel with the mountains. “Perhaps he is north of us.”
Brad couldn’t believe his ears. Since when did May believe in such hocus-pocus? She fell to her knees on the cushion and set the incense stick back in the sand. She remained stiff, her head bowed.
Maybe he had written the whole religious thing off too quickly. Maybe it was the key to finding her dad after all.
Just then, the tranquility was broken by the brassy trumpet call of Star Wars. It was his cell phone.
He opened it and wiped the dampness off the screen. He made out the number of Jade Wang.
“Hi Jade,” he said, and walked out onto the courtyard for better reception. “Did you get a hold of President Qian?”
“Earl and I tried to meet with him late this afternoon.” The disappointment was unmistakable in her voice. “We wen
t to Zhong Nan Hai. I wanted to persuade him that Liang has found Shangri-la and to call off the hunt for you.”
“And?”
She paused and he heard the sounds of a television playing in the background.
“He was too busy to meet with us. A number of world leaders have suddenly chosen to visit China today, and Qian couldn’t deal with small problems.”
“Boy, of all the self-centered… Wait. You said world leaders? Like whom?”
She reeled off a list of names, including the President of the United States and several European prime ministers.
He sat down hard on a stone bench. Could the heads of governments have any connection with Liang hauling Yu off to Shangri-la? For the first time, it occurred to him that Liang might be after Shangri-la for bigger reasons. Liang did have a megalomaniacal streak. He lusted after power, not longevity. Certainly, Liang would find a way to capitalize on his discovery.
But, suckering in the President of the United States? Naw. It was too far-fetched even for Liang to consider.
“So what’s your next move?” he asked.
“I’m going to turn the TV off and haul Earl to bed.”
Poor woman. “Ah, sweet dreams.”
“And you?”
He looked around the primitive rooftops of town. “We’re still looking for a bed.”
Jade didn’t seem ready to hang up just yet.
“I’m afraid you will miss our wedding,” she said. “Earl and I are getting married Friday. And it’s almost Thursday.”
“Ooh.” That was the last day that he and May could get married, too. “I fully expect to be there. Somehow.”
“Well, good luck.”
He hung up.
May had lined up two sets of prayer cushions far from the smoke. “We will sleep here tonight,” she said, and stretched out under the stars.
Clearly, she had heard his end of the conversation and didn’t need to hear the whole story. For the moment, they didn’t need to dwell on their defeats.
“We will be married in two days,” she said with a shiver.
He snuggled up close to her. “That’s the spirit.”
“We will find my father. We will go to Beijing. And we will register officially at my provincial civil affairs department.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“Then I will celebrate number twenty-five as a married woman.”
He flipped onto his back and stared up at the stars. They were burning bright against the black velvet sky. How in the world was he going to find Dr. Yu in time to get married?
How was he going to find Yu at all?
He felt a warm breath. It was the breeze. A wavering cloud of incense lingered in the air for a moment before drifting to the north.
Chapter 50
Igor Sullivan drove to CIA headquarters bright and early with Linda at his side.
It felt grand to tool around in a convertible with a cute young thing hanging on one arm. If this was a midlife crisis, he recommended it highly.
But when he entered his office, the stack of Truman diaries and letters sent his thoughts right back to where he had left off the day before. Warm memories of the sweet night spent with Linda drifted to the back of his mind.
He had inserted a paperclip at the entry that spelled out Truman’s typing up and signing a secret agreement. It was all so hush-hush, it reminded him of a blood oath between schoolchildren.
The words of Professor Fried still echoed in his mind. “The code binds you to silence. The code states that the truth of Shambhala should never be revealed to mortal man, except when the Kalika King passes the torch to the next Kalika.”
From the perspective of a new day, after dinner of tapas and intense eye contact and a hearty breakfast, he wondered why there was any need for secrecy. He felt like shouting the truth from the rooftops. After a world war caused by secretive regimes, hadn’t society needed a little transparency in 1945? Why wouldn’t the leaders reveal Shangri-la’s existence?
And why had Hitler and Stalin’s governments been so enigmatic? He opened the diary to the page he had bookmarked. Suddenly the words took on a whole new meaning. Stalin had been looking for Shangri-la.
He reread the passage. “Stalin’s quest has gone unfulfilled. To further this effort, we sign agreement. Couldn’t use a secretary—had to type it up myself. I’m such a hunt-and-pecker.”
And if Stalin had been trying to make deals to secure parts of China after the war, weren’t the other powers also taking a bite out of China? Japan had bombed Shanghai and marched on to Nanjing, then killed and raped their way further inland all the way to Sichuan Province. Then Hitler had signed a pact with Japan. Meanwhile, the Americans had moved in to defend China, helping the Nationalist Chinese establish a beachhead in Chungking and Yunnan Province.
Maybe the Second World War was really all about China.
He grabbed his phone and dialed the research department, where the call bounced around from desk to desk until it reached Linda.
“Boy, you’re hard to reach,” he said.
“That’s because you don’t know my extension.”
“Is it too late to ask for your phone number?” he said. “We have already had our first date.”
“And what a date it was.”
Sullivan smiled in agreement. “And now we have a rendezvous with history.”
“More Truman?”
“No. I want you to dig up everything you can on Hitler, Stalin, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s fascination with Shangri-la.”
“Hit, Stal, FDR. Got it.”
“Please bring it by my office personally in the next few hours.”
“Personally?”
“Along with a cup of coffee so we can work on the material together.”
“Right away, sir.”
Two hours later, he heard a faint knock on the door. He crossed to open it. It was Linda with a cup of coffee in one hand, a stack of books in the other and a pen in her mouth. Her lips thus occupied, she was all business.
They set up two chairs opposite his desk and organized the books between them.
“Let’s start with Hitler,” he said.
Sullivan had been doing some preliminary research online.
Hitler was fascinated by eastern religions. He had sent a team to measure the skulls of Tibetans in order to establish German racial supremacy. He adapted the temple cross as the swastika, he was an avowed vegetarian, and the name of an ethnic minority in China, the Naxi, may have inspired the Nazi party’s name.
“Ah, I think that is mere coincidence,” Linda said. “You should get your head out of the shorthand world of the Internet and read a few books. Check this out.”
She handed him a thick tome titled “Hitler’s Ahnenerbe: Bureau for the Study of Ancestral Heritage.” Boy, there was so much more in books than on a computer.
He began with a chapter on the beliefs of the German occult in a mythic land called Hyperborea-Thule, a northern kingdom whence the German race supposedly originated. Although that land had slipped northward and become the North Pole and Greenland and Iceland, underground tunnels à la Jules Verne still linked it to the rest of the world. The superhumans who came from the north to rule what Nietzsche called the “herds” had a psychokinetic energy called “vril” with which they could conquer the world.
“It’s frightening how people can believe in fiction,” Linda said. “They take a good story and begin worshiping those in it.”
“It shows an over-reliance on intellect,” Sullivan said.
“Something you’ll never have to worry about.”
“Hey!”
In the early part of the 20th Century, many Germans believed that they descended from the Hyperboreans and that their destiny was to rule the world. Hitler, who had studied the occult and theosophy in his youth in Vienna, became initiated into the Thule Society, which created the German Workers Party. In 1920, Hitler became head of the party.
“Sounds like Adolf was the
ultimate consumer,” Linda said. “He bought all this garbage.”
Sullivan read on in horrified fascination.
At that time, a German general from the First World War brought his interest in Japan, India and Tibet back to Germany. He created an inner circle of the Thule Society called the Vril Society that tried to connect with underground supernatural beings in order to gain their powers of vril. The Vril Society also adopted their leader’s theories that the Aryan race came from Central Asia. The Geopolitical philosophy developed by the group espoused the conquest of land in order to gain “breathing space” and inspired Germans to retake the land of their origin.
While Hitler was in jail in 1923, Rudolf Hess taught him the Vril Society theories. Ten years later, Hitler used the Geopolitical theory to form his doctrine of conquering Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia. And the way to ensure the success of this military operation was to obtain the powers of vril from the Aryan’s forefathers in Central Asia.
Although the swastika was already in use in Germany as part of an anti-Christian movement, it took on greater significance to Hitler once he learned that it meant “immutable good luck” and was used by Hindus, Buddhists and Jains on their temples, thus increasing his certainty that Germans came from Central Asia.
Hitler’s efforts to crush Christianity for its non-evolutionary principles of weakness and forgiveness and its Jewish roots also supported the Thule Society’s attempts to wipe out rival cults that worshiped anti-Christs and Lucifer. Hitler was to replace God and Christ and lead the master race. But the master race needed the vril, the power, to conquer the world, and for that they needed to return to the land of their origin.
So in 1935 Hitler created the Bureau for the Study of Ancestral Heritage. Its mission was to resolve, or prove, the question of the origin of the Aryan race, which they suspected was in Tibet, and to gain the power of vril that its spiritual leaders possessed.
“You can see Hitler searching for his roots,” Linda said. “And in the process he was going to invent Shangri-la if he had to.”
“But he didn’t have to invent it.”
“What do you mean?”
